I'm currently working on my wordpress theme that is on wp.org but have not been updated for almost 2 years. One of the things that I would like to do is to have a tab where I got all my theme options that displays the change log and any news that I may post.

Now I did google around about this but I have not been able to find something that will work without having to use things like curl and so on. Idealy I would like to use the functions provided by wordpress (to fech files and so on) to avoid any issues that may come up when I go and put the new version up on wp.org.

Does anyone know where I should start? I'm also looking at having html tags in the xml file as well.